


shaken & stirred

by onceuponamirror



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, smells like teen crackships, topical discussion of canonical gentrification ahead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 12:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13387422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onceuponamirror/pseuds/onceuponamirror
Summary: There are always things that bubble. Laughter, anger, attraction— champagne, most of all. In those golden, floating bubbles are the thoughts she should avoid, things she shouldn't dwell on, tries not to, guilt to stamp out.It never really works.





	shaken & stirred

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: veronica meets sweet pea for the first time, canon-ish. post-college, daddy issues ahoy. 
> 
> tumblr drabble for a crackship i no longer have no opinion on.

 

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She has a headache. 

A headache that may be more accurately qualified as a migraine; more precisely a pre-hangover; more exactly as a tsunami of roughly a decade’s worth of pent up frustrations. 

This whole night is awful—a joke, if she’s being honest, all these preening people, money fluttering down from the heavens, playing with people’s lives as they always do. 

She just needs to get away, away from the glittering chandeliers and bubbling drinks, and stalks out of the ballroom in search of liquid salvation. Veronica crosses through the lobby and finds the hotel bar empty, just as she’d hoped. Daddy had practically rented out the whole venue for this fundraiser, which means she’ll be left undisturbed in any other part of the hotel.

Veronica slides onto a stool, allows herself a moment of eyes-wide-shut careful breathing, and then opens a look onto the bartender. “Martini. So dry it makes me think of climate change.”

“Think that would probably be the opposite. Rising waters mean _more_ storms,” the guy behind the bar says, throwing her a skeptical look. He’s clearly wearing the hotel’s uniform, but pairs it with a ridiculous beanie that she’s quite sure would never fly anywhere else but this absurd place. 

He adjusts the cardboard box in his arms, which clinks with the movement. “But I’m not the bartender. You’ll have to wait.” 

Veronica inhales sharply. “Tell me. Does _anything_ in this post-surrealist town run at normal speed?” 

He looks back at her, as if unsure if he appreciates the joke. “No,” he says flatly after a moment, and then disappears behind a kitchen door, which swings after him. She stares at it, her head gives a pound, and she decides she doesn’t care. 

She throws her legs off the stool and slides down, a decent drop to the floor for her, and cuts around the bar. She’s been drinking champagne already and all those bubbles tend to rise right to her amygdala, something her mother would sneer at as a dangerous combination. 

Of course, except having taken the bar exam, she’s never tended a bar itself. But she’s been mixing drinks since she was thirteen and filled with an impetuous desire to prove something—and she’s preferred mixing her _own_ since sixteen, for reasons she doesn’t hold dear. 

Even in her heels, it’s a bit of a reach for the better gin, but she manages it, her bracelets jingling with the effort. She’s just begun shaking the ice when the kitchen door swings back open and a tall—quite tall—guy appears through it, blinking when he sees her behind the bar.

He’s wearing a similar hotel uniform as the beanie-clad scowler, and his neck arches as he takes her in, folding his arms at once. Like his predecessor, he seems to regard her with inherent suspicion, but there’s something different as he runs his eyes up and down her form, lingering on the sequins on her dress and pearls around her neck.

“I was told there was someone waiting for a drink. Guess they didn’t wait,” he says after a moment. Veronica rolls her eyes and finishes with the shaker. 

“Women get nowhere when they’re too patient,” she replies with a sarcastic flutter of her eyelashes, reaching for the gin and adding it to the mixture. 

The guy pushes off the wall, pulling the vermouth off its higher shelf with no difficulty. She supposes bartending is an apt position when one is as tall as the model skyscraper in the Time’s Square FAO Schwartz.

He hands it to her, and then his posture immediately returns to crossed, studying her carefully, as if watching and waiting to see if she actually knows what she’s doing. 

It’s only when she’s nearly prepared the martini and turns to him and says, “Olives?” in her most expectant voice that he breaks into an amused look. He reaches across her, picks out a toothpick from one container and stabs three olives at once, and offers her the skewer with a slightly mocking bow.

She carves an eyebrow his way, and accepts the offering, dropping it into her glass. Veronica then draws her clutch bag open, fishes out two tenners and snaps it shut, putting it back under her arm. 

Lips and eyes lifted, she reaches up and tucks the bills into his uniform breast pocket as she walks past on her way to the other side of the bar, sidling back onto her stool and sipping gently at her drink.

After a long moment, the bartender decides to move, putting away the bottles and passing her a small napkin for her drink. “You’re pretty dressed up,” he says, running a rag up and down the counter. “You’re here for that _fundraiser_ in the ballroom, I guess.” 

Only Veronica herself has been known to spit the word _fundraiser_ with such contempt—years of resentment over cancelled recitals and forgotten performances in lieu of some event her parents neglected to tell her they were attending— _don’t waste your time pouting, mija, it’s unbecoming_ —and she rests an elbow on the bar, appraising him. 

“Unfortunately, indeed I am,” she agrees, sipping again at her drink. _Not bad,_ she thinks, trying to remember when she last shook her own martini.

For the first time, the bartender smiles. It’s an appealing look, and then it shifts, clearly a darker thought taking hold. Veronica is surprised to hear herself think it does nothing to diminish his attractiveness. 

His uniform runs high along his neck, but there’s a dark spot peeking out along the brim of it, and she realizes it’s a snake tattoo.

Veronica stares at it, and wonders with gleefully morbid curiosity how furious Daddy would be if she brought home a bartender with a neck tattoo.

“It’s so fucking stupid,” he mutters under his breath. “They’re tearing down people’s homes for a fucking golf course.”

Veronica runs her tongue along her teeth, considering her words. He obviously doesn’t know who she is, or he wouldn’t be saying that to her. Or—perhaps not in such a confiding tone. 

“I take it you’re not in favor of progress,” she says, tilting her head at him. 

His smile runs thinner. “It’s nice that they keep coming up with new words for ugly bullshit. _Progress_ ,” he adds sharply, raising his eyebrows. “My grandma’s trailer makes way for _progress_.”

She pauses, sipping at her drink, perhaps to stave off a sizable pang of guilt. Truthfully, the past couple of years, Veronica has made an effort to not think too hard about her father’s business deals—she knows it puts a sour taste in her mouth, and she’s chosen her own profession, independent of his, for a reason. 

She’s just here to smile pretty for photos, not dirty her hands, even if that feels harder to justify in the face of the one across from her. 

_It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong._

A thought she’s sat with for months, as long as she’s known about Daddy’s plans to demolish half of the town he grew up in—out of spite, she’s fairly certain—her lips pursed against voicing it, afraid of her father’s wrath for hearing it. 

Ever since she announced she wanted no part of Lodge Industries, that she would forge her own path, her father has treated her like an outsider, a stranger, a betrayal he took personally. 

And perhaps, in the angry, neglected heart of her, that’s how she meant it. 

“Listen, I agree with you. But from what I hear, development is already underway,” Veronica sighs, putting down her martini. The drink is as bitter as the truth. “I’m sorry. Really, I empathize. I just don’t think there’s anything left to be done about it.”

But the bartender just shakes his head at her, wearing a wan grin. “People like you always say that.”

“People like me?” Veronica repeats, offense tinged on every word. “You don’t know me.”

 _Though if you did, your argument would be stronger,_ she admits to herself, holding down a sigh as her finger traces the dew on her glass. 

“Look at you,” he scoffs, gesturing vaguely at her glitzy outfit and pearls. “This kind of town—these kinds of lives—must just look like something on a map to you.”

Veronica frowns, running her eyes across his face, something about his words uncorking a long-buried thought in her chest. 

Eventually, he shrugs. “And there _is_  still shit to be done about it. We’re protesting the groundbreaking tomorrow, me and a bunch of buddies. Everyone in the trailer park agreed not to move. So we’re not giving up, even if we have to shell out for some fancy lawyer.”

“That’s her,” a voice from across the room sounds, and it’s the beanie-wearing guy from before, pointing right at her. A blonde woman about Veronica’s age with a notepad offers him a far more thankful smile than necessary, her hand squeezing at the interloper’s arm—Veronica can practically see his blush from here—and then beelines straight for her, ponytail bouncing. 

“Miss Lodge, I’m Betty Cooper, with _The_   _Riverdale Register_ ,” she says without preamble, shoving her hand out to shake, which Veronica does, shocked into habit. “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes regarding your family’s plans for demolishing Sunnyside trailer park in favor of needless gentrification. Do you realize you’ll be uprooting roughly thirty families with nowhere else to go?”

The bartender scoffs loudly, as if it’s an inadvertent sound, staring at Veronica in a completely new light. Certainly not one that happens to be flattering. His expression is practically florescent. “Unbelievable,” he says blankly. 

Veronica blinks at him before forcing her gaze back onto the reporter. “I’m—I’m not associated with the company business. I’m just a lawyer.”

“But you’re Veronica _Lodge_. You must have an opinion,” Betty insists, a type of intrepid concentration in her eyes Veronica recognizes and, truthfully, respects. 

The bartender is shaking his head at her, disgust on his face, and for some reason—Veronica can’t stand that. And he was right, of course, right about it all, about what Daddy is doing.

It’s—it’s—

“It’s awful,” she says before she can think on it further, sitting up straighter in her stool. “My opinion is that it’s awful.”

Betty’s mouth falls open, pencil comically poised against the notepad, and then seems to snap out of it, a dangerously excited gleam in her eye. “Are you saying, on the record, that you stand with the local protestation of the demolishment and gentrification of Riverdale’s south side?”

_What will Daddy think?_

_What will Daddy_ do _?_

And then—

 _Fuck him,_ she thinks. 

Veronica raises her neck and sits at her full height, recrossing her legs. 

“Yes,” she says clearly. “In fact, would there not be an obvious conflict of interest in personally representing the interest of Sunnyside trailer park, I would offer to do it. In lieu of that, I am more than happy to make the right calls so that this inevitable court battle gets handled by the best in the business. Pro bono,” she adds, throwing a sharp, pointed look at the incredibly stunned bartender. 

Betty’s eyes flick from him to the other guy, who has moved next to her, all trading expressions of shock. 

“That’s very kind of you,” she eventually manages to stammer out. “Would you be willing to set aside some time for a formal interview with _The Register_ to discuss plans for fighting your father?”

Realizing the full weight of what she’s just done and feeling neither guilt nor shame about it, Veronica’s conscious feels clear for the first time in—well, perhaps, ever. 

It’s a feeling she didn’t know how badly she craved, a weight she had no idea was so heavy until it was gone, and she revels in it now, like she might float right out of her skin. 

“I would be happy to, Betty,” she says cheerily, and then twists in her seat to face the bartender, reaching back into her clutch bag for two of her business cards and offering one up to her. 

“We’ll set up a lunch.” Then she turns to the bartender. “You’ll need one as well,” she says, passing it to him, and he takes it with surprisingly nimble fingers. 

He lets out a breath, his expression wholly wide and wholly unreadable. 

Veronica slides off her stool, throwing back the rest of her drink and settling it firmly on the counter. “Call me tomorrow,” she says, and he nods, once. “I’ll need your name, to know who to expect.”

“Um, it’s…Sweet Pea, actually,” he says, after a moment. Veronica gapes, and then a laugh bubbles out of her. 

“Oh, god. That’s going to make Daddy even more furious,” she says on a sigh, grinning. “Well. Talk to you then, Sweet Pea. We have a lot of work to do.”

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**Author's Note:**

> i genuinely had no opinion on this fun little crackship until today. full steam ahead, because why the hell not. drop me a review and tell me what you thought---technically, this was my first time writing from veronica's pov! very fun.


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